Thursday, December 8, 2011

AVWW Beta 0.547, "Power Coding Round 1," Released!

There is nothing subtle or incremental about this one. All the stats for characters and monsters have been reworked internally, and as part of that we've redone the general balance and flow of combat. Enemy spells tend to be a lot slower now, but more plentiful and more frequent. Trash mobs have a lot of health and now do substantial damage, but there are fewer of them. And did we mention the eagles? Yeah, the most-hated enemy should be a lot more fun and palatable for folks now.

Similarly, the terrain itself has been tightened, so there is less wandering through uninteresting space, and so there are fewer same-y buildings, and so there is less empty sky for espers and amoebas and bats to wander off into. The result is really a different feel in the exterior areas, accentuating the existing differences in each region type through making them all more focused in general.

We also changed the multiplayer synchronization model around a ton, so now enemy positions and enemy shots will be synchronous between clients. Let us know if you run into any issues with this, but based on the reaction to our other model this should be way more popular with players. The one downside is that this does mean that sometimes enemy positions will need to correct themselves, and right now that means the enemy just jumps to the side and that might make you miss a shot against them. But we'll have smoothing for that later, and the really good news is that still your shots and enemy shots never will have jumps of that nature. Multiplayer details have been updated here.

There are also a variety of general bugfixes in this version aside from the above, and there's a new way that enemies flash when you hit them with a spell. There are also some new room maps by Josh, and he's created a new wiki article explaining the maps for new players.

Keith and I have both entered a power coding phase to follow the recent brainstorming/design phase, so there are a few metric tons of changes coming in the next week or so. This is the first batch of them, but there will be more batches as we can break it up. Given the scope of the changes, this means that the game is going to be in a moderate state of disarray for a week or so, in terms of general balance and such. We're doing our best to keep things as clean as possible, but the difficulty in particular might swing up and down some substantially during this time. The end result is going to be pretty darn cool by the end of next week, though.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.